


the Clubhouse

by de_la_cruz87



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, One Shot, Platonic Male/Male Relationships, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21604153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_la_cruz87/pseuds/de_la_cruz87
Summary: "I could ask one of the guys...."The thought terrified him. He wished he could be so full of anger, like Clay, that there was no space for fear. But then, Jensen didn’t know Bryce like he did – didn’t know Bryce at all. He didn’t understand how afraid he should be of taking the other boy on.But Justin knew someone else who would understand perfectly.
Relationships: Montgomery de la Cruz & Justin Foley
Comments: 15
Kudos: 74





	the Clubhouse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beekitties](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=beekitties).



> Set between the end of 2x05 and 2x06, Justin makes good on his offer to try to find out the location of the second polaroid.
> 
> This one-shot is a connector between **Joyride,** and my next fic, **Dizzy** , which will go live in the next week or two, but it should also work as a canon standalone one-shot, if you like :)

When he was small, Justin was afraid that he would walk his legs down to stubs.

For most of what he could remember, his mother hadn’t owned a car. There was that one banged up, little old Corolla, when he was five or six, and she had finished her third round of detox since he had been born, leaving him with the El Salvadorian woman who lived in their neighbourhood and babysat him and nine other kids in a one-bedroom apartment while Amber worked weekends behind the register at a small corner grocery store. The woman had been in her sixties, and accepted a crumpled handful of cash to mind him full time while she went into a five-day detox program; the kind old man who owned the grocery store feeling sorry for her and talking to some friends in social services to find her the free placement – a kindness that she later repaid by stealing $217 in cash from her till float and disappearing. 

But that incident was after the almost-four-months of sobriety that she managed following detox, and despite how much she had struggled, she had _tried_ – she told him how hard she tried and Justin believed her. She worked enough hours to buy the Corolla from a man on Craigslist, and after long days of sitting in front of the television in the old lady’s apartment, his head craned back to stare at the Spanish-speaking soap operas she watched all day, full of energy from eating bowls of sugary cereal for every meal, his chest had swelled with pride when the other kids watched from the apartment window as he ran out to jump into the passenger seat of his mother’s car. She always made sure he buckled his seatbelt, and would let him pop the cigarette lighter for her, although he wasn’t allowed to touch it once it was glowing red hot. 

Then, one day, not long after she had stopped working at the grocery store, the Corolla had been gone and she had been late to collect him. Her eyes had been distant and glassy, and she hadn’t thought to buy any food with however much money she had gotten selling the car, but she had bought him a knock off _Transformers_ action figure from a trinket store in Chinatown, an off-brand Starscream, the colours wrong but the transformation functions mostly working. And even though he had been hungry, and he much preferred the Autobots to the evil Decepticons, he had treasured that little piece of plastic until one of her boyfriends threw it across the room, along with everything else that had been on the coffee table, in a furious search for a cigarette lighter. One of the wings had snapped off, and it wouldn’t transform after that. 

Aside from the short-lived Corolla, their only options had been the bus, or their own two feet. 

Sometimes the bus was fun – he liked people watching and he liked being out of the weather, especially during winter or the night. She would let him pick the seat and he always chose the very back, where he could look at all of the things they were passing by, leaving behind, and could stretch out with his head in her lap, dozing on those nights when they rode from the first stop to the last, with no destination. Sometimes the bus was scary – they had been held up by a man with wild eyes and a dirty knife, once – who had taken his mother’s money and groped her roughly before darting down the stairs at the next stop, leaving them both in tears. Sometimes it was his mother who was the scary one, screaming at the other passengers or the driver, accusing them of staring at her, of trying to read her mind, of stealing from her, judging her, or sometimes nonsense words that he couldn’t even comprehend as he tugged at her hand, begging her to get off, to stop and calm down, before somebody called the police. 

He had layers and layers of memories of walking with his mother, laden with bags of groceries or their belongings, through city streets or rough neighbourhoods or along busy roadsides, sometimes in the dark and sometimes in the rain. Often, his mother had made a game of it – sometimes the game was to see how quietly they could sneak out of the house or apartment, always an extra challenge when her boyfriend was snoring on the couch, or the roommate whose valuables she had stuffed into their bags was due home from work any minute. Sometimes the game was sticking to the shadows, like they were invisible, edging along against buildings and ducking behind a dumpster or post box if she thought she spotted a familiar car. Sometimes the game was just to pass the time and stop him from complaining about how his legs were tired or asking how much further there was to go – count how many blue cars you see, how many men with beards, how many ladies with brown handbags. 

Compared to a lot of those memories, walking in Evergreen County didn’t seem so bad. 

Justin had done a lot of walking in the last five months. For a little while, he had had a skateboard, but he hadn’t been much good at staying on it, his balance shot to shit, especially when he was between hits and getting the sweats and shakes, and it became more of a hindrance than a help. He had eventually sold it for five bucks and just stuck to walking. Depending on where he had been squatting or had slept that night, the walk to the soup kitchen for food or one of the shelters for a shower could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to over an hour, but the distance hadn’t bothered him – not as much as the way he felt as he walked through the city. He moved between people and along footpaths like a ghost, not a part of the same plane of existence as everyone else, ignored and entirely forgotten. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling – sometimes, when he was a child and his mother had been struggling particularly hard – they got the same looks, or non-looks, the diverted eyes, the uncomfortable distance as people shifted to give them wider berth. 

It didn’t hurt any less.

Walking in the early morning dusk, Jensen’s hooded sweater zipped over his t-shirt and the hood pulled up, his duffle slung across his chest and bumping against his thigh, a familiar, comforting weight; Justin felt a little more secure, a little more normal. Car headlights washed over him and cast his shadow over the roadside, proof that he truly did exist. He shoved his hands into the pockets of the sweater and flicked his thumbnail anxiously back and forth over the cover of the phone he had been hiding from Clay since they had left Oakland. The phone he used to own had been one of the first things he had pawned after he ran out of money, but he had quickly realised that dealers weren’t just standing around on street corners, waiting for his business. He had needed a phone to coordinate where he needed to be and when, and so he had picked up the cheap, second hand, pre-paid model at a pawn shop and protected it with his life. Occasionally, he thought about using it to call Jess, but usually, when he got that urge, he distracted himself by texting his dealer instead.

Walking on, Justin bit the inside of his cheek until the salty taste of blood seeped beneath his tongue, his body urging him to turn west, toward the docks – he would definitely be able to score there, even at this time – while his head stubbornly forced him forwards, toward the silhouette of town, the huge, looming shape of the Mercy Hospital complex in the distance. 

Justin had seen it when they had driven in to town two days earlier – his forehead lolling against the back window of Tony’s Mustang, leaving a mark that he didn’t have the energy to be amused by the thought of Tony angrily discovering later. Huge billboards with architectural renderings of what the refurbished children’s wing of the hospital would look like once complete, imagined patients and staff smiling calmly in the projection, as if anyone in the children’s ward of a hospital had cause to grin so serenely. 

It wasn’t the billboards that had caught his attention. It had been the contractor’s trucks, lined up in the temporary parking lot behind them, brought in on short term contracts to dismantle and demolish the interior of the existing wing. 

“I could ask one of the guys,” Justin had suggested earlier that day, turning the polaroid of Bryce, bare-assed and grinning triumphantly, over in his hand. Bryce’s smile was the only thing he recognised in the picture, the couch, the table, the bare arm and leg beneath Bryce, even the writing, blue marker on white medical tape across the back, all of it unfamiliar, even as he peered at it again. “Figure out-“

Jensen had cut him off before he had completed the thought, had snatched the photo back even as he tried to explain, as if he could read all over Justin’s face that, as much as he meant it – he would show the photo around, try to figure out where it had been taken – what he really, truly wanted was an excuse to get out of that fucking room. After five months of spending no more than a few hours at a time indoors, the claustrophobia had been unexpected but suffocating, adding to the gnawing inside his chest and stomach, the throbbing in his head, the shrieking in his veins, reverberating across every nerve ending, as his body railed against him. 

He had forgotten the thought, momentarily – distracted by Tony’s ungraceful arrival through the window, his mind flashing for a panicked second to that morning when he had come downstairs from the apartment to find the red Mustang parked unexpectedly against the curb outside, Tony leaning against the driver’s door, a blue and black floral shoe box on the car roof by his shoulder, his expression unreadable. 

But later, lying on the couch in Jensen’s bedroom, hours after midnight and wide awake, his body wracked with shivers that seemed to pulse outward from his very core, his mind wandered as he started up at the posters and drawings pinned to the roof, questioning what in the ever-living fuck he was doing – Jess didn’t want him here, she couldn’t, she _shouldn’t_ , Clay was playing him, that had been obvious enough from what Tony had reluctantly given up – but still… 

As the sun crested over the helipad on the roof of the hospital, Justin trotted across the street and hopped up the curb at the edge of the temporary contractors parking lot, a gravel expanse already busy with trucks and lined on one side with large dumpsters, marked with labels announcing the materials that were authorised for disposal in each. Despite the early hour, there were people moving about, a couple of husky, middle-aged guys in jackets and hardhats drinking coffee from thermoses while they smoked by the contractor’s entrance into the work site, a section of scaffolding strapped with tarpaulins to protect from dirt and debris, the walkway lined with planks of wood. On the edge of the site, an Asian woman, a dark-skinned man and a slightly built young guy with dark hair beneath his green plastic hardhat stood with large, printed plans held out between them, talking quietly and pointing out features of the building to each other. 

Justin hesitated by the dumpsters. He didn’t want to be spotted and forced to leave before he had managed what he came for.

Tony might think that bringing him back here had been a bad idea – maybe he was right. Jensen might see him as a hindrance, a frustration, but a means to an end – and that was probably right, too. But fuck them. He hadn’t come back for them, or for Hannah and the crusade Clay was waging in her name. He had come back for Jess, to make up for the unforgiveable ways he had failed her, had hurt her, and there was only one way to do that. 

He had to take on Bryce. And he had to win. 

The thought terrified him. He wished he could be so full of anger, like Clay, that there was no space for fear. But then, Jensen didn’t know Bryce like he did – didn’t know Bryce at all. He didn’t understand how afraid he should be of taking the other boy on.

But Justin knew someone else who would understand perfectly.

Peering around the edge of a dumpster marked for tiles and full of smashed and broken shards of ceramic, he spotted the boy walking from the site entrance. He was dressed in dirty jeans, splattered over the years with paint and plaster and grout, both knees torn and fraying, crumpled over well-worn work boots, and a black uniform t-shirt, DE LA CRUZ CONTRACTING stamped in white across the front. As he stepped off of the wooden walkway, heading toward the parking lot, he lifted one gloved hand and removed his hardhat, swivelling the Liberty Tigers baseball cap that he wore backwards underneath it, to shade his eyes from the bright morning sun. From the shadow beneath the brim, Justin watched the boy cast a glance over his shoulder at the architects nearby. The man in the green hardhat – a college work placement, Justin decided; he couldn’t have been more than maybe twenty – met the look with a lingering glance of his own, even as his colleagues stepped away for a closer look at a nearby outcropping.

Clenching his jaw, the boy looked away, his grip tight on the edge of his hardhat as he crunched across the parking lot to his father’s truck, parked next to the familiar Jeep Wrangler. Taking advantage of the careless noise he made shifting tools around in the tray, Justin cautiously walked closer, his footsteps gentle and almost soundless – he had practice moving around squats and shelters where it was courteous not to wake the other people sleeping at his feet. For just a fraction of a second, he hesitated, watching the other boy lean down to hang the hardhat from the truck’s tow-ball before leaning in over the tray gate, tugging a heavy sledgehammer free, but he was too close to retreat now. He pressed his hands deeper into the pockets of Jensen’s sweater. 

“Hey, Monty.”

Monty turned with the sledgehammer in one hand, apparently not recognising the voice or expecting someone else. Surprise registered in his expression for a moment before his eyes narrowed and a cold smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. 

“So, the rumours are true -” he said, making a grand, sweeping gesture with his spare hand and leaning forward in a mocking imitation of a bow. “- the golden boy has returned.”

Justin watched the other boy watching him, and was struck, not for the first time in the three years that they had known each other, how separate they were, not only from each other – that had been their own choice, not necessarily a direct one, but a secondary side-effect of choosing Bryce – but from everyone around them. While Justin had spent the last five months as a living spectre, unseen and unwanted, drifting the streets of Oakland, everyone that he knew had gone about their normal routines – waking up, showering, brushing their teeth and eating breakfast with their parents and maybe their siblings, driving or bussing or walking to school. 

And while he was floating, untouchable, and they were all going about their days, convinced that Ms Baxter’s history assignment was the worst thing that could possibly be inflicted on a person, Monty was doing this.

Justin knew, because he had heard him trying to explain to Zach and Luke by Bryce’s pool once, barely biting down the anger at their ignorance, that the reason he was consistently late to morning practices was because, when his dad had a work contract, they would get up before the sun at four, and he would work for two or three hours, depending on whether or not there was a training session scheduled that morning, then put in an hour of batting practice or tackle drills or, sometimes, just running punishment laps because Coach Rick or Coach Morris were sick of him showing up late, and that was before he started first period. 

Justin could understand why kids like Zach and Luke couldn’t comprehend what it meant to have to contribute to the survival of their families, but the fact that, every year – Miss Antilly and then Porter and then probably whoever they hired to replace him – would make Monty come in and speak to them about why his grades were fluctuating, reminding him that he would need to sign up for remedial classes in the summer if he wanted to keep off of academic probation and keep playing sports – as if he didn’t know or there was anything he could have done about it if he wanted to, felt more and more like wilful ignorance. 

“Look, dude, I don’t want to cause any shit,” Justin said, watching Monty let the sledgehammer handle slide in his gloved grip, the heavy head hitting the ground with a reverberating thud. He swallowed back his hesitation, and made himself look the other boy in the eye. “I just need your help.”

Monty chuckled, shaking his head.

“And why in the fuck would I help you with anything?”

Justin had expected this. It had been an emotional decision, one that had been building inside him for weeks, growing until he felt as if he were bursting at the seams, trying to keep it contained, but he had known, even when that last thread of self-control had snapped and he had practically screamed in Jessica’s face _because he fucking raped you!_ , that nothing could ever go back the way it was. Not between him and Jess, not between him and Bryce, and not with Monty or Alex or any of the other guys who had been there that night. He had slashed a line in the sand between them with those words, had severed the links that connected them, had cut the lifeline that had meant the difference between sinking and survival for more than half of his whole life. 

He had broken Bryce’s one rule – _keep him clean_ \- and anyone who answered that betrayal with anything other than scorn and rejection would be guilty by association. 

But he had to try. For Jess.

“I just need to know where Bryce is hanging out these days,” Justin said, and it sounded feeble, even to his own ears, an unhelpfully vague attempt to manoeuvre the other boy into providing information he probably couldn’t even identify from Justin’s description, let alone be persuaded to share by the thin note of pleading in his voice. “I mean, you know, where he goes to party. Where you guys hang out.”

The other boy eyed him. 

“Why? You want to try to get back in his good graces?” Monty asked, and there was a defensiveness in his posture, his shoulders squared and tone an unmasked challenge. “Because he’ll kick your ass before he lets you back in.” The corner of his mouth ticked up in a smile. “Or I will.”

Justin glanced down at the sledgehammer. Even without it, Monty had at least fifty pounds on him, and most of it muscle from football and wrestling and weight training and manual labour. Justin could fight – defensively, desperately, if cornered – but Monty was a bred brawler. He learned how to punch by taking them, learned how to inflict pain by being hurt, and had been taught to like doing it by taking all of that anger and hate and turning it outward. He wouldn’t need a sledgehammer, or Bryce’s blessing, to destroy Justin. 

“I don’t want to see Bryce,” Justin said, earnestly, because it was the truth. “I don’t want to fight you, or make anything harder for you. I just need to know this one thing.” He searched the other boy’s face for understanding, for any tiny hint of empathy, but whatever he felt was locked tight behind a mask of anger and scorn. Justin pressed on, regardless. “It’s a place with a couch, a coffee table. Not the pool house. Somewhere he goes to party with chicks, I think?”

Monty narrowed his eyes, and Justin clenched his jaw to keep from flinching under his scrutiny. He had been uncertain how much to tip his hand – how much the other boy would even know, let alone be willing to give up. There was nothing about the polaroid that suggested Monty had been there at the time it had been taken, or that he had ever been to the place before at all. Justin had a sudden spark of realisation – it had been five months since he had last had contact with Bryce or Monty or any of his former friends. He had no idea how the grenade that he had thrown into their midst that night by the pool had impacted any of them. 

It was unlikely – but possible – that saying what he had, shouting what he had, had changed things. Suddenly, the truth was out there and undeniable. Up until the moment the words tore out of him, it had seemed like the only option he had, to deny what he should have been able to see, and with guilt and hindsight, he chastised himself that he could have put two and two together about what Bryce was doing when he was alone with girls, especially in the context of what had happened to Jess. Finally acknowledging that what he had written off as wild, boyish fun was anything but, might have unlocked the cages of the other boys, provided the excuse or the justification they needed to be able to break away from the wilfully blind loyalty that tethered them to Bryce. 

He and Monty - they had acknowledged it, once. Sort of. 

They had agreed that, in their version of reality, there wasn’t room for anything but their independent friendships with Bryce.

But now, things were different. The massive space that Justin’s loyalty to Bryce had taken up in his life was gone, and as much as that had caused a huge, painful void that he hadn’t been able to fill, no matter what he tried to throw into it or plaster it closed with, it was _space_. Space for others – for Monty – to make the same choice he had. Because Justin wouldn’t ever be Bryce, but without Bryce, he could be something more to others, to Monty. Maybe, it wasn’t ridiculous to hope that the other boy had seen that, or, if he hadn’t, could maybe see it, now. 

But then, Monty’s expression changed, and any hope that Justin had felt faded. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Monty was a shitty liar.

He couldn’t manage to keep the defiance from leaking into his voice and expression, inviting challenge, even when the lie was blatant.

Justin was used to it – Monty didn’t keep everything hidden, not things that people maybe thought that he would, or should, like the cuts and bruises that appeared between one school day and the next – but there were plenty of other things he lied about. Normally, they were unimportant, or unselfish – told to protect Bryce or one of the other boys. He had lied to protect Justin, too. But this lie impacted Jessica, and Justin couldn’t abide it. 

He looked the other boy in the eye and steeled his voice until he sounded far more confident than he felt. 

“You don’t need Bryce, you know.”

Monty raised his brows and nodded slowly, as if this was something he had never considered before, and for a moment, Justin felt that tiny spark of hope flicker dimly back to life inside his chest. 

“ _Oh _,” Monty said, and the meagre little spark was snuffed.__

__Justin thought miserably that there should be some sort of award for the amount of scorn that the other boy managed to cram into a single syllable. The smile that followed was cruelty dressed up prettily as curiosity._ _

__“Tell me, Justy. How many people do you figure knew about your crack whore mom?” If the flash of hurt and anger that darted across Justin’s expression bothered him at all, he didn’t show it, maintaining the enquiring smile. “Not even in your whole life. Just since you started at Liberty. Fuck it – in the last year?” He lifted one gloved hand, counting off from his thumb to his fingers. “Bryce. Zachy. Marcus. Alex. Coach Patrick. The whole basketball team? Porter,” He made a flip-flop motion with his hand. “Let’s be generous, say half of the staff at school. A few sheriff’s deputies?” His eyes went hard and cold. “Hannah Baker? Jessica Davis?”_ _

__“Fuck you-“ Justin bit out, and Monty laughed, brittle and empty. Justin shook his head. “What’s your fucking point?”_ _

__Monty shrugged his shoulders carelessly, leaning casually on the sledgehammer._ _

__“Nothing, I guess,” he said, his tone deceptively conversational. “Just that, of all those people, all those mandatory reporters and girls who were supposed to love you, the only person who ever gave a shit and did something about it was Bryce.”_ _

__Justin knew that what he was saying wasn’t only true – because as much as it hurt, it fucking was – it wasn’t even about him. The exact same truth applied to Monty. Teachers and coaches and teammates and friends – Justin, himself – had known for years that the bruises on the boy came from the same place, were dealt by the same hands, every time. For every opportunity Monty had had to reach out to Justin, to support him, to intervene, to report what he saw or knew or heard to someone in authority – Justin had the same opportunity in return, and he had let it slip by, wordlessly, without action. Thinking back on it, he couldn’t even come up with a reason why. Neither of them had ever said to the other that they didn’t want help, or asked the other to stay out of things that weren’t their business._ _

__The only person who had ever helped either of them – as questionable and fickle and costly as that assistance had been – was Bryce._ _

__At least, it had been that way for Justin, for so long that he didn’t think it would ever be different._ _

__But then there had been Jess. Sweet and strong and beautiful, clever and passionate, devoted and caring and gentle. Everything he could have ever wanted, and somehow, he had managed to luck into, because he knew he didn’t deserve her, definitely not now, but not even back then. Falling in love with Jessica had been the easiest thing he had ever done, easier even than loving Bryce, and that was the problem._ _

__Justin regretted the way that he had tried to protect Jess from the truth of what had happened to her. It had been a mostly selfish and wilfully ignorant attempt to maintain what they had had. The connection between them was cracked, but not quite broken. He told himself that it could still be fixed. But that wasn’t true. Bryce hadn’t only shattered the relationship between him and Jess that night at the party at her house – he had slammed their friendship aside so hard that it had been fractured, too. Because, as much as what he had done to Jessica had been about entitlement and power and sexual gratification – the way most things were, for Bryce – it had been about Justin, too. A reminder of who he belonged to, and what his place was, and that there was no room in his life for loyalty to anyone that even came close to matching, let alone surpassing, his loyalty to Bryce. A warning to Jess, that she would never have the power he had, not over Justin, or in any other form, ever. Justin had been his._ _

__And what he had done was more than **what’s yours is mine**._ _

__It was **nothing is yours.**_ _

__**Everything is mine.** _ _

__**And fuck Jessica for making you think otherwise**._ _

__Once, Monty had cared enough about Justin to protect him in Bryce’s absence. To keep him from going hungry, from sleeping rough, from coming to harm. And then Bryce had punished him for it, had made him regret thinking that he could be anything to anyone._ _

__Maybe, the other boy could care about someone other than Bryce again._ _

__Before he could think better of it, Justin pulled the phone from his pocket, navigated to the photograph he had snapped of the polaroid that he had slipped from the pocket of Clay’s jeans where he had left them draped over the back of his desk chair, the other boy sleeping fitfully only a few feet away, and held it up._ _

__“This place,” he said, watching Monty lean forward and squint a little to focus on the photo. “I need to know where it is.”_ _

__Justin watched the puzzled expression fade from Monty’s face to be replaced by something he hadn’t quite expected – horror. His lips parted and his breath hitched, and something flickered behind his eyes, like something breaking or locking into place, the reaction totally uncontrolled. Justin faltered. It was a confronting photograph – it made him uncomfortable to look at, even though he didn’t recognise the girl from what little was visible of her beneath Bryce – but Monty had never been someone who was easily shocked or riled. This was a boy who faced violence in his own home, who thrived on it in the outside world, who, like all of them, had seen Bryce feeding girls more alcohol than they could handle and coercing them despite their discomfort, and who had avoided intervening, who had chosen self-preservation over morality, who had given up saving others in order to save himself. While the polaroid was the most concrete proof of Bryce’s misdeeds that Justin had ever seen, it didn’t show anything they didn’t now know Bryce to be capable of, and Monty’s reaction, that hint of pain that tightened around his eyes in the moment before he wrestled back control of himself and slammed down the familiar mask of fury over whatever else he felt, didn’t make any sense._ _

__Monty’s voice was quiet and dangerous when he spoke._ _

__“Where the fuck did you get that?”_ _

__Justin shook his head, and before he could answer, the other boy reached for the phone, bristling when Justin snapped it back, out of his grasp._ _

__“Give it to me,” Monty said, and it was the clearest command that Justin had ever heard from the other boy, who almost always defaulted to agreement and going along with the group. When Justin shook his head, refusing, Monty’s leather work glove creaked as his grip tightened on the handle of the sledgehammer, and for one breathless second, Justin was absolutely certain he was about to have it swung directly into his face. He thought of the gun, secreted in the bottom of the duffle, but he knew that he couldn’t get to it, not before Monty hefted the hammer, and anyway, he didn’t think that he could point it at the other boy, even if it was unloaded, even just as a defensive warning. Monty’s jaw clenched, and something like platitude crept around beneath the forcefulness in his tone as he added, “You can’t go around showing that to people.”_ _

__For one strange moment, it struck Justin how odd it was the Clay and Monty agreed on that point, even if their motivations were entirely opposite._ _

__“Why? Because it shows Bryce for what he is?” Justin asked, searching Monty’s face. The other boy gave nothing, just flat, edgeless anger and, disappointed, Justin unzipped the duffle bag slung across his shoulder, tucked the phone inside and zipped it closed. He looked at Monty, who was looking at his bag. “I know there’s more than one of these. I know where the originals are. They’re all taken in the same place,” he insisted. “Where is it?”_ _

__Justin looked for any hint of hesitation, and thought he saw it, a flicker of tense indecision in the way that he clenched his jaw, but the other boy shook his head stubbornly._ _

__“That place -” Monty said. “- is more than just somewhere to party. And that photo -“ he looked at Justin’s beat up duffle bag, as if calculating whether he could wrestle it away from him before any of the other workers were alerted to their scuffle and came to stop him. “- isn’t yours. You don’t have a fucking right to ask any of this.”_ _

__Justin realised now that Jensen had been right. He should have stayed in that stupid bedroom, with the stupid couch that was more comfortable than anywhere he had slept in the last five months, the stupid clean clothes and stupid hot shower and stupid food, those stupid idiots who climbed through the window to keep him company, so that he wouldn’t go through the shakes and the fever and the illness alone, even if it wasn’t really for him – all of it, really, was for Hannah – but they still did it, and he was still grateful for it. And yet, here he was, abandoning them to try to appeal to a boy who had never been his friend, who he had never been a friend to either, who had no reason to help him and wasn’t going to, because even if it was only a vicarious side-effect of their care for Hannah and the justice she was owed, Justin had people who cared about him, and Monty didn’t have anyone but Bryce._ _

__After hours of walking to get from the Jensen’s leafy, quiet neighbourhood to the hospital work site, his insides still quaking and clenching and wailing with residual need, he felt, all at once, exhausted._ _

__“Fuck it,” Justin sighed, waving a hand. “Just forget it.”_ _

__He turned to leave, but managed only a couple of steps before the other boy called to him._ _

__“How’d you get Jensen to let you stay?”_ _

__Frowning, suspicious, Justin paused and turned._ _

__“How’d you know I’m staying with Clay?”_ _

__Monty offered a slow smile – he hadn’t, but he did now. Probably, it had just been a guess based on where Justin had been seen with Tony and the vicinity to the Jensen’s street. Monty saw the realisation dawn in Justin’s expression, and it only seemed to amuse him more._ _

__“Really, though,” he insisted, with a lopsided smile. “How’d you convince him to let you in? You suck his dick or something?” he chuckled at the suggestion, shrugging. “I know he’s always hanging around that faggot Padilla, wouldn’t surprise me.”_ _

__Justin knew that the barb was meant to incite a reaction, was meant to belittle and humiliate not only him, but the boys who had rescued him, who had gone out of their way to pluck him from an existence that, if he was honest with himself, probably would have seen him dead by the end of the year. It was more than anyone else had done for him – ever – more than even Bryce had offered, and despite that it was familiar, the ridicule in the other boy’s voice set alight a fury in Justin that he didn’t know had existed. A deep sense of betrayal and abandonment. Because, even though he hadn’t wanted him to, Bryce hadn’t ever come looking for him, hadn’t even tried to call him after that afternoon when he had handed him the bottle of vodka in the alley beside the Blue Spot, and neither had Monty, or anyone else._ _

__Those guys, Bryce’s boys – Justin’s friends – had never been his friends at all._ _

__And _fuck him_ if he thought he was going to make Justin feel like he hadn’t deserved any better than that. _ _

__“You know what?” Justin said, voice sharp edged with a level of anger that sent a flash of surprise across Monty’s features. “I see you. I see what you are and how fucking terrified you are of it.” Justin’s voice softened, slightly, as guilt rushed him, crowding in beside his anger, a reluctant sort of understanding circling both. “I’m sorry, dude, that I didn’t get it before.” Realisation started to creep into Monty’s expression, followed quickly by terror. Justin raised his brows earnestly. “It’s what you were trying to say in the pool house that day, after the Bronco, right?”_ _

__In the last five months, in between scoring and finding a safe place to sleep and scraping together enough food to press down the hunger pains, living on the streets had mostly involved a lot of waiting. Waiting until the shelters opened in the evening, waiting until a dealer he could partway trust showed up at the agreed place but rarely on time, waiting for a particularly hard day to be over, so he could start another one. And Justin had spent a lot of that time thinking, turning over conversations and moments in his mind, considering them from other angles, wondering what he could have done differently, what opportunities he had missed to splinter off of the path that had led him here, to make a decision that might have saved him and others some level of pain._ _

__It had been one evening, after he had ducked into an alleyway with a middle-aged man in a sports coat who wrung his hands nervously but still wouldn’t be swindled - _you’re pretty, kid, but not forty-bucks-pretty_ \- and Justin had tucked the crumpled ten dollar bill into the pocket of his jeans and gone back out to the curb where a couple of other boys were waiting, passing the time chatting and smoking, eyeing the cars that crawled past, hoping to catch the eye of a potential john. It was one of the only places in the city that Justin had found which wasn’t controlled by a gang or hustler – it could be dangerous picking up in unfamiliar areas, he had earned himself a couple of beatings when he let his cravings get the better of him and risked it – and the other boys there were like him; homeless, addicted, alone. They didn’t exactly help or look after each other, but they didn’t hurt or put each other in danger either, and he had come to find that was the best he could hope for._ _

__Stepping onto the curb – he needed more money if he was going to score that night, and he had already texted his dealer optimistically to arrange a hook up later – Justin had wiped the back of his hand across his mouth self-consciously, and glanced at the boy standing to his left, feeling his gaze on him. The other boy hadn’t smiled, and had looked away after a moment, but Justin had realised, later, that it was a look he had recognised. It was the way that Monty had looked at Tommy Shuster when they crossed paths in the halls, before Tommy graduated. The way that he sometimes looked when Bryce got them into clubs, and Monty would let his gaze wander over the dance floor while the rest of them drank and joked and hit on girls. The way that he had looked at the young architect as he had walked out into the parking lot, and the way the architect had looked back._ _

__It was the reason his father had been so furious to find them together in his bedroom that morning._ _

__The reason he had beaten the boy almost beyond recognition, despite that he didn’t care about the Bronco they had wrecked, which had been insured and replaced, the careless owner neglecting to admit that he had left the keys in the ignition._ _

__The reason that, despite the fury that drew his brows together in a frown, Monty’s cheeks flushed red with humiliation beneath his freckles, and terror cut an involuntary tremor through his voice._ _

__“Fuck you.”_ _

__Justin turned fully to face the other boy again, making a conscious effort to relax his body language, thinking of the volunteers at the shelter he had met, the social workers who had offered him addiction counselling and support programs, the way that they held their unthreatening posture even when he bristled defensively, spitting at them to fuck off and leave him alone._ _

__“I understand why you’re scared about Bryce finding out. The way he’d twist that shit around on you if he knew,” he said, and that only seemed to make things worse, the realisation that his fear wasn’t unfounded cresting in Monty’s expression, whatever tiny sliver of hope he had held that he might be overestimating Bryce’s willingness to hurt him for his own gain washed away. Justin hoped that, if he treaded carefully, he could seize the realisation and swing it around the other way – if he could convince Monty that what he was afraid of was warranted, then maybe he would be open to an alternative._ _

__Monty’s rigid defensive posture was unrelenting, his hand trembling with the tight grip he maintained on the handle of the sledgehammer as he insisted,_ _

__“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”_ _

__Justin shook his head._ _

__“You don’t need Bryce,” he repeated, and he meant it, and he wished that Monty could understand that. There were alternatives, there were other people who could care for him and about him, if he would just give them a chance to do it. That Justin knew that it seemed impossible – making a conscious choice to sever the lifeline that Bryce represented. One that Justin wouldn’t have been able to make himself if he hadn’t had Jess as motivation, a shining, pure beacon of hope that things could be better – that he could be better._ _

__And he was a very pale, poor substitute compared to her, but maybe, he could be that beacon for Monty._ _

__Monty scoffed._ _

__“Fuck off, Foley,” he hissed, the hurt and betrayal in his voice obvious even though he spoke quietly. “You’re the one who fucking left.”_ _

__Justin realised, in that moment, why this wouldn’t work – couldn’t have worked. Maybe any chance at success had been lost when he had left for Oakland, or maybe it was before that. What felt somehow like a lifetime ago, sitting on the couch in the pool house, when Monty had asked him if they were friends. Maybe it hadn’t really been what he meant to ask – close to it, but not exactly right. He hadn’t meant – are we friends? What he had meant – what he hadn’t been able to ask, for fear of rejection or appearing weak or soft or disloyal to Bryce, was – can we be friends?_ _

__And Justin had said no._ _

__Back then, he didn’t think they could be._ _

__And so, they weren’t. And now, they never would be._ _

__Because by doing what he had done – by breaking free of Bryce, by leaving – he hadn’t just betrayed Bryce. He had betrayed Monty. He had abandoned him to a position that he wasn’t equipped to fill and that Bryce didn’t consider him a fit candidate for in any event; a weak and insufficient replacement for Justin. It must have seemed to Bryce like he had lost the loyal Retriever that he had grown up with, that knew all of his commands and tricks, that he had loved more than anything, or as much as he knew how to love, and had replaced it with a shelter mutt, traumatised and feral from a life of fighting and being terrorised, that didn’t know how to do anything he wanted, didn’t understand basic commands and didn’t seem capable of learning them either, that made him angry just thinking about the loyal pet who had run away from the best home it had ever had, who bore the brunt of that anger and, with nowhere else to go, kept coming back for more._ _

__It hadn’t been what he had intended – he hadn’t meant to punish anyone but himself by leaving - but, given the opportunity, Justin knew that he would make the same choice again._ _

__He would do what he had to – hurt who he had to – to protect Jess. To make sure she knew the truth. To make sure that she saw justice._ _

__What had happened to her was his fault. Not just because he hadn’t tried hard enough – done enough – to stop it, letting his own trauma choke him into inaction. Not just because he had hidden the truth from her, thinking it was better that way for her and knowing that was a lie. But because he was the one who had put her in that position – not by drinking himself into oblivion with her that night, but by letting her in, taking the love she offered that he didn’t deserve and letting her get close. Being close to him had meant being close to Bryce, and Justin knew now that he never could have protected her, but he had covered that fear over by reassuring himself that Bryce was his friend – he loved him – so he would never have cause to need to._ _

__It was bullshit. And, deep inside, he felt as much responsibility for what had been done to Jess as if he had done it himself._ _

__He would see justice for her, and he would take down every single person who stood in the way of that._ _

__He owed her that much._ _

__But still-_ _

__Justin spread his hands, helpless to explain the conflicted regret that churned inside of him._ _

__“Look, man. I’m sorry-“_ _

__“Yeah, I’m fucking sorry, too” Monty cut over him, expression full of furious hurt and desperation to aim it anywhere but inwards. “Sorry none of us were worth as much to you as your cheating slut girlfriend.”_ _

__A tiny part of Justin’s defensive instinct insisted that, if he was fast enough, he would be able to snatch the sledgehammer from Monty and swing it before the other boy had time to react, but he pinched it between his thumb and forefinger like a nuisance insect. Justin might have made the choice – knowingly or not – that day in the pool house, that they could not be friends, but today, the choice was Monty’s, and he had made it clearly._ _

__Monty was siding with Bryce, and would go down with him._ _

__It wasn’t what Justin wanted, but he would see it done._ _

__There was no turning back for either of them now._ _

__“You won’t ever be worth as much as she is,” Justin said, his voice calm. “Because all you’ll ever be is this,” he waved a hand at Monty, and considered his next words carefully._ _

__**Just say it. Say it, and it will be done** _ _

__Justin lifted his chin and met Monty’s gaze directly._ _

__“Bryce’s little faggot errand boy.”_ _

__It hurt him to say, but he forced himself not to retreat from it, to make the break as clearly and sharply for both of them as he could, like amputating a limb with an axe – it had to be a quick blow, a clean sweep, that achieved its purpose all at once. In some ways, it was harder than it had been to cut himself free of Bryce, because Monty was, always had been, an extension of Bryce, and killing whatever fraught relationship that still existed between them was like killing his heartfelt devotion to Bryce all over again, and truly, desperately, he wished that it could have been different. All of it._ _

__Part of him expected Monty to lash out, to shout all of the horrible things he knew and felt about Justin into the quiet morning so that everyone around them heard and knew that they were undeniable. Part of him expected Monty to launch at him, to swing the sledgehammer at him, to grab for his throat or throw a fist or reach up and out with all of that fury and pain and tear the whole work site down on top of them._ _

__But the boy just smiled – almost – and nodded._ _

__It was a cruel exchange, but it was a goodbye that they both understood._ _

__Readjusting the strap of his duffle bag across his chest, Justin turned and, resisting the urge to look back, walked away._ _

**Author's Note:**

> So, turns out I'm such an ao3 noob that, even after scouring the posting dashboard last night, I managed to miss the (now, the following morning) very obvious gifting field! 
> 
> I'm still not sure how it works, so, just in case - this fic is dedicated to beekitties, my lovely friend and beta, my trusted and much appreciated Justin Foley expert, who steers me back onto the right and true Justy path, who supports and encourages me at every step of writing these fics, and without whom they wouldn't exist. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! I would love to hear what you thought x


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